Traditional digital video recording (“DVR”) devices, such as set-top box devices located in subscribers' homes, include hard drives or the like within which recorded media content may be stored for subsequent playback. Unfortunately, a DVR device's hard drive may run out of available storage space after a certain amount of recorded media content data is stored therein. Moreover, with the ever-increasing amount of available media content programming, a user may easily miss recording media programs in which the user may be interested.
Various types of cloud-based DVR services have been developed to address these limitations of traditional DVR devices. For example, a network DVR service may provide virtually unlimited storage capabilities for users of the network DVR service by remotely recording and storing copies of media content (e.g., within one or more network-based servers maintained by a provider of the network DVR service) in response to requests by users to record the media content. The network DVR service may subsequently receive a request provided by a user to play back the recorded media content by way of a local computing device (e.g., a set-top box device, a mobile computing device, etc.), and, in response, provide (e.g., stream) one of the copies of the media content to the local computing device in order to facilitate playback of the recorded media content by the local computing device.
As another example, a “catch up” television service may automatically record all television programming broadcast by way of one or more television channels (e.g., within one or more network-based servers maintained by a provider of the catch up television service). The television programming may be available for subsequent network access by users of the catch up television service for a predetermined number of days (e.g., a week) after it is recorded. In this manner, users do not have to manually select television programs that they would like to record.
The viability of these and other cloud-based DVR services depends on the ability of cloud-based DVR service providers to accurately and efficiently detect advertisement breaks (and, in some cases, specific advertisements included in the advertisement breaks) within media content recorded by the cloud-based DVR services. This is because providers of the media content may require the cloud-based DVR services to apply specific playback policies to the advertisement breaks (e.g., by not allowing users to fast forward through the advertisement breaks during playback of the media content) before allowing the cloud-based DVR services to record the media content.